Category: reason

Harbor Point and Baltimore’s Taxpayer-Funded Edifice
Complex is the latest video from ReasonTV. Watch
above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting
links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.

View this article.

Harbor Point and Baltimore’s Taxpayer-Funded Edifice
Complex is the latest video from ReasonTV. Watch
above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting
links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.

View this article.

As Nick Gillespie
mentioned last month, The Washington Post has hired
former
Reasoner Radley Balko to write about criminal justice
and civil liberties. Radley’s
first post went up today, and in addition to introducing its
author to his new audience it listed “some widespread and
potentially harmful misconceptions about the criminal justice
system”:

• The number of dangerous defendants who
“get off on a technicality” is so small, it’s barely significant.
Somewhere between 90 to 95 percent of criminal cases are resolved
with plea bargains before ever getting to trial. Among those that
do get to trial, conviction rates in most jurisdictions run at 80
percent or higher.

• Another striking misperception: The crime rate in America has
been dropping dramatically since the mid-1990s. The murder rates in
our largest cities are at lows we haven’t seen in a half century or
more. Yet Americans consistently believe crime is getting worse,
not better. Last October, 64 percent of respondents told Gallup
that crime was getting worse in America. Only 19 percent correctly
said that it’s getting better.

• Likewise, the job of police officer is getting safer. Last year
saw the fewest gun-related homicides of police officers since the
19th century. Assaults on cops are dropping, too. Yet
we’re regularly told that policing is one of the most dangerous
jobs in the country. In fact, you’re more likely to be murdered
just by living in about half of America’s largest cities than you
are while working as a police officer.

• Everything you know about forensics is probably wrong. Those
magical machines that churn out precise and detailed information
based on a half-footprint, a fiber, or a clod of dirt so that Ted
Danson or David Caruso can then go on to solve the crime? They’re
mostly fictional. Prosecutors call this “the CSI effect,” and they
complain that these shows condition jurors to expect far too much
from forensic analysis. On the other hand, an unscrupulous
prosecutor and forensic analyst can also exploit those
expectations. DNA analysis—which was developed within the
scientific community—has shown us that forensic analysis—which was
developed largely in the law enforcement community, and is often
practiced without scientific standards like peer review and blind
testing—is deeply flawed.

You can read the rest
here. Congratulations to Radley, and—maybe more to the
point—congratulations to the Post and its readers.

Since 1988, Gallup has been asking Americans how they
self-identify: as Democrats, as Republicans, or as independents?
The trend lines are unmistakable:

And just like
last January, the polling organization’s results for the prior
year show a
record percentage going indy:

Forty-two percent of Americans, on average, identified as
political independents in 2013, the highest Gallup has measured
since it began conducting interviews by telephone 25 years ago.
Meanwhile, Republican identification fell to 25%, the lowest over
that time span. At 31%, Democratic identification is unchanged from
the last four years but down from 36% in 2008.

These results are bad news for the party of Barack Obama….

The current 31% of Americans identifying as Democrats matches
the lowest annual average in the last 25 years.

….And they are bad news for Republicans, who—amazingly—have
failed to gain while the rest of America continues to lose under
the Democratic president:

When [George W. Bush] left office, Republican identification was
down to 28%. It has declined or stagnated since then, improving
only slightly to 29% in 2010, the year Republicans “shellacked”
Democrats in the midterm elections.

Not only are the trend lines clear over the past quarter
century, they’re clear over the past 12 months:

As the Gallup write-up points out,

The 46% independent identification in the fourth quarter is a
full three percentage points higher than Gallup has measured in any
quarter during its telephone polling era.

Those commentators who still self-identify with one of the two
dwindling major tribes will surely contend that a 42 percent
independents number will not soon translate into anything like a 42
percent vote for a third party, nor does it mean there’s a 42
percent bloc of centrists, or libertarians, or any other monolithic
grouping of jackalopes. All of which is true.

But as Nick Gillespie and I argue in
The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix
What’s Wrong With America (a distillation of which you can
read in the
August 2011 issue of Reason), the economy/society-wide
loss of brand loyalty and gain of individualized, tech-fueled
disruption will hit politics and especially governance
last, because of government’s guaranteed revenue streams
and party-rigged insulation from competition. But just because it
will happen last, doesn’t mean it isn’t already beginning to
happen. Here’s a bit from that magazine excerpt, all of 29 months
ago:  

Where will the next political smart mob, the next online swarm,
come from? Look wherever there is too broad a gap between the two
major political parties and their bases. One good short-term bet is
the issue of rolling back the drug war, which professional
Democrats from the president on down openly mock while a growing
number of Republicans (such as presidential candidates Ron Paul and
Gary Johnson) gain surprising support by uttering the
unspeakable.

Looking pretty prescient now, right?

Gallup routinely finds fed-up voters leaning increasingly
libertarian on a
whole host of issues. Even non-libertarians like Charles
Krauthammer
express something like awe at how quickly libertarian
impulses—particularly those that professional politicians have long
blunted—are
gaining the upper hand. Voters who act like free agents are
inherently difficult to herd, and are capable of producing sudden,
dynamic change. As Gallup muses:

The increased independence adds a greater level of
unpredictability to this year’s congressional midterm elections.
Because U.S. voters are less anchored to the parties than ever
before, it’s not clear what kind of appeals may be most effective
to winning votes. But with Americans increasingly eschewing party
labels for themselves, candidates who are less closely aligned to
their party or its prevailing doctrine may benefit.

Expect some discussion on this topic on tonight’s episode of
The
Independents.

In a victory for competition in
Nashville, its City Council has severely reduced its taxi
protectionism by slashing the minimum fee limo or livery drivers
must charge from $45 all the way down to $9.75.

From
The Tennessean:

Council members approved the $45 fee in 2010 as a way to
distinguish between taxis and livery vehicles, but some later came
to think they had set the minimum too high.

The change also will allow San Francisco-based Uber, an
app-based service that’s in about 30 cities across the United
States and 70 around the world, to come to Tennessee for the first
time. Uber customers use a smartphone app that stores their credit
card information to order a ride. When they do, the GPS-powered
software contacts drivers of private cars in the area and gives
them a chance to make the trip.

Uber plans to start operating its top-level Uber Black service
in Nashville as soon as Mayor Karl Dean signs the bill into law,
spokeswoman Nairi Hourdajian said.

Not mentioned in the story is that the Institute for Justice had
filed suit against
Nashville in order to overturn the absurd price floor. But last
year a jury ruled on behalf of the City of Nashville, upholding the
law. It’s notable that a city council, having been told that their
anti-competitive meddling is perfectly legal, nevertheless realized
that it’s a bad idea for its citizens.

The Tennessean concludes by noting that while critics
complained that the new minimum would cut into taxi drivers’
businesses (appropriate response: So?), there wasn’t a big presence
by cab drivers at the council meeting.

Hat tip to Dan Alban
of the Institute for Justice

All politicians, activists, and
citizens contemplating transformative reform to the status quo
should look for pointers in Colorado’s end to pot prohibition. When
the worst headline you can find about the end to pot prohibition is
that some dispensaries have run
out of weed (overstated, but we’ll get to that), you know
that reformers have pulled off something pretty exceptional.

Lesson number one is to start small. Colorado is not just the
first state to allow commercial sales of recreational pot
(Washington state will open its own market later this year), it’s
relatively small and isolated, thus making it a perfect laboratory
for this experiment. Other states can watch and learn and figure
out the best way to adapt Colorado’s (and Washington’s) experience
to their own situation. As the designers of Healthcare.gov could
tell you, going all-in before various options have been tried and
beta-tested is almost always a really bad idea.

That’s part of my latest column at
Time.com’s Ideas page. Other lessons include using markets (the
freer the better) and decentralizing decisionmaking to the
individual level whenever possible. That includes giving
individuals the right to opt out of reforms. Had Obamacare not
revolved around the individual mandate (and forced Medicaid
expansion until the Supreme Court struck that down), it might have
done a better job of increasing coverage and keeping costs in
check. As it is, some 30 million Americans won’t gain coverage
under the president’s universal coverage reform.

Colorado’s pot legalization regime is far from perfect, but it
offers up serious lessons that are worth considering.

Read the whole thing here.

In the East, Bill de Blasio won
election as New York’s new mayor on a promise to end economic
inequalities. In the West, Kshama Sawant, a member of the Socialist
Alternative Party, won a seat on the Seattle City Council by
campaigning for a $15 minimum wage. A. Barton Hinkles posits that
correcting inequalities caused by system-rigging is desirable, but
“correcting” (as opposed to merely alleviating) inequalities caused
by merit-sorting would actually be unjust. It also would require
creating an inequality of a different sort: the inequality of
authority.

View this article.

• General Ray Odierno, the army chief of staff,
  says the U.S. ought to take a “wait
  and see” approach to sending troops into Iraq, though the time
  was “certainly” not now.  The U.S. and Iran both
  denied cooperating on the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq.
  Meanwhile in Syria, rebel commanders
  warned Al Qaed- linked jihadists that they ought to surrender
  or face “massacre,” giving them 48 hours to make a decision, and
  non Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamist fighters have reportedly
  seized an Al Qaeda headquarters in Aleppo.
• Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ new memoirs call into
  
  question the competence of several members of the Obama
  administration, including the president. The White House has
  
  responded to Gates’ characterization of Vice President Joe
  Biden—Gates called him a man of integrity who was nevertheless
  “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security
  issue over the past four decades”—by claiming Biden is, in fact,
  competent, and that Obama relies on his counsel every day.
• An American military helicopter
  crashed off the coast of North Norfolk in England, killing
  four.
• The FAA
  says hobbyists can fly remote controlled aircraft, but when a
  journalist used a drone to capture footage he wanted, the FAA says
  that was commercial activity and therefore illegal.
• The “polar vortex” sending cold air across North America can be
  
  felt as far south as Atlanta. It’s colder than a summer’s day
  on Mars.
• The mayor of Durham, North Carolina
  announced a report on the November death of a teenager in
  police custody will be out before Friday. Cops say the teen shot
  himself in the head while handcuffed in the back of a police
  cruiser.
• Sony says it’s sold more than 4.2 million Playstation 4 units
  since the console’s November release,
  more than 1 million more units than Microsoft said it’s
  sold.

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On Monday, less than a week after Colorado’s
state-licensed marijuana shops began serving recreational
consumers, the anti-pot group Project SAM thanked three
public figures who “have galvanized our movement.” One of them was
Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity
Fair, The New Yorker, and The Daily
Beast, whose contribution consisted of this insight,
which she offered to her 75,000 Twitter followers last Friday:
“Legal weed contributes to us being a fatter, dumber, sleepier
nation even less able to compete with the Chinese.” If this is what
passes for smart commentary among pot prohibitionists, says Senior
Editor Jacob Sullum, it’s no wonder they’re losing.

View this article.

The Boston Parks
and Recreation Commission has banned smoking in all city
parks. Those caught violating the ban face a $250 fine. Barbara
Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission,
said the ban will make the parks safer for nonsmokers. “Secondhand
smoke in any concentration is dangerous,” she said. “There’s no
safe level of exposure.”